If you’re one who frequently photographs in your free time, then you’re probably well aware of the dreaded “burnout.” It’s that feeling of stasis that digs in after a long stint of snapping your shutter. It’s a bit like that callous that begins to develop after an hour or so of playing guitar.

I feel there are two solutions to that feeling. One is to stop altogether – take a breather, and recompose. And the other involves stepping it up; finding something new; and rekindling the excitement you once had for taking photos. In the past year, I’ve slowly stepped up the challenges I’ve assumed in my photography, whether it required greater risk, greater physical demands, or ever-deeper preliminary research – each new location has brought with it new challenges, higher potential to “screw up,” and much, much more promising rewards.

Scott Haefner and I have been exploring places for over a year now. The two of us, along with a few others (whom I have grown to trust and rely on for moral and logistical support) have been through thick and thin. Scott was there for Neverland. We were both there when a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle tagged along for a trip deep inside of a defunct sugar refinery. We’ve been nearly a hundred feet underground in scores of missile silos. And we’ve evaded security guards more than once, often to the chagrin and knowledge of said security guards.

So it came to be a few months ago that the two of us decided to explore a Neo-Gothic, 26-story masterpiece in downtown San Francisco. Full credit for discovering the building belongs to Stephen Freskos, who originally scoped the building. I took a few scouting trips in the weeks that followed. Scott and I finally decided to make the leap – underground.

Exploring the Pac Bell

On a Scale of 1 – 10 in exploration difficulty, the Pacific Telephone Building probably hovers between a 7 and 8. The fact is: This building was most recently bought for $118 milllion by a well-known San Francisco investor. Though it has been abandoned since 2005, it remains fully manned in the lobby by a watchful security guard who, unlike most night security guards, actually manages to remain fully alert and awake during his shift.

Scott and I walked up to a pre-determined entry point. We had, just minutes earlier, temporarily borrowed some orange cones from the Museum of Modern Art. Looking as official as two hoodlums could look at night with dark camera bags on our backs, we hopped deep into the basement of the 26-story building, just as drunken revelers a block away squinted in confusion at the two men disappearing beneath the sidewalk. We were in the basement of the Pacific Telephone and Telegraph building. It was there, 89 years ago, that the first pylons were driven into San Francisco mud. At that time, the building was constructed at a cost of 4.8 million, a fraction of its last $118 million sale. One couldn’t help but notice the symbolism inherent in building the West Coast’s tallest skyscraper only decades after the city’s most disastrous moment in history.

As Scott and I peered into the fully illuminated basement (this abandonment was fully powered and seemingly alarmed with motion sensors — an unpleasant surprise to seasoned explorers such as ourselves), we took note of the massive boiler, which provided heat to the entire structure. It stood two stories high and about 40 feet across on each end, the end of its back, receding into the unilluminated portion of the basement. As we climbed the catwalk into the second level of the basement, we heard the faint sound of the guard’s radio. It almost sounded as if he was listening to a baseball game. Really: One could only wonder what he was listening to at 11 at night.

The Pacific Telephone building is probably one of the best preserved buildings we’ve photographed. Designed by James Rupert Miller and Timothy L. Pflueger, it still stands proud in the San Francisco skyline, alongside newer – but less auspicious – spires. After we had ducked in a dark corner in the building’s former underground garage, we spent a few heart-wrenching moments trying to decide whether or not to head up. The guard was, after all, within a few feet of our only way up. Sitting literally six feet beyond a set of semi-transparent double doors, you could hear him turning the knobs on his radio and tapping his feet out of boredom. We had taken considerable risk to get where we already were, so the decision was expeditious and absolute: We would make our way up.

Two Eras, Two Buildings

Exploring the Pac Bell Building is a different universe than Oakland’s own abandoned jewel, the Key System Building. To say nothing of their opposing architectural styles. One exhibits the forward-looking sleekness of an Art Deco, Neo-Gothic hybrid, and the other a Beaux Arts bone of the past with its own elegant curves and pilasters. The true difference between the two is in the experience alone.

I’ve written that exploring Key System is a spiritual pilgrimage. Its meaning – to me – is not in its size, nor the way the light plays on stale puddles of mud that edge their way around the dark reinforced pillars, in a way begging any avid photographer to take a shot, even when all one really wants to do is look. The Key System building is simply a dark place of refuge and an escape into the past. The Pac Bell Building, on the other hand, is gigantic (the tallest abandoned building both Scott and I have explored). Its alabaster walls and perfectly preserved fixtures seem to represent everything that we explorers tend to walk away from — yet the building still drew us both inside, and higher.

We tiptoed up the stairs, one by one, until we reached 26. Bursting silently into the top floor lobby, we poked around the old equipment rooms and emerged outside, high above the rest of San Francisco. Only a single, embellished belvedere stood above us, two stories higher than the top floor auditorium. One could only wonder what it felt like in 1926, when the airplane was a relatively new and untested contraption that only a few moguls and quixotic adventurers had been given an opportunity to try. For a moment, I framed my mind in the world of Proust, imagining myself to be the unknown pilot that Marcel describes when he first sights a plane:

“I felt that there lay open before him all the routes in space, in life itself; he flew on, let himself glide for a few moments over the sea, then quickly making up his mind, seeming to yield to some attraction that was the reverse of gravity, as through returning to his native element, with a slight adjustment of his golden wings he headed straight up into the sky.”

In the distance, 747s skeeted over the bay bridge at half the speed of sound. To the northwest, rooftop bars and revelrous company parties ocassionally startled the eyes with the distant flashes of disposable cameras. We looked ahead to the looming sentries – the eight plastered eagles watching over us. Alarmingly enough, we realized, despite clearly evading the eyes of the guard down in the lobby we were still being watched by these thirteen-foot behemoths. And their own wings were a constant reminder of the heights we had just reached.

Scott and I did the usual long exposures from the top and staggered our way down, feeling all the more zombie-like with each floor. We had managed to make it down to Floor 16 – finding the original board room in the process. When we finally wedged ourselves up from underground and emerged back into the dark streets of 4 AM San Francisco, a lone man from Australia – seemingly unsurprised at our whack-a-mole-like appearance from the ground – started chatting with us and asked for directions to his hotel. He staggered off in search of a bed, any place where he could lay down and let the alchohol evaporate from his system.

Walking back, we arrived at Scott’s truck to find its windows broken. On our final trip a few nights later, his bike was stolen. I’d like to think we were vexed by the watchful eagles from the top, but if that’s the case, I’m afraid of what and when my own recompense will become? Despite these setbacks, we had managed to explore every floor of the building, from top to bottom, splitting up floors between Scott, Stephen and me on our farewell visit. Soon after we visited, PacBell Building had started its own phase of development in full-force. The permits were granted and the building will find a new life as 135 “extra-large” condominium units.

Whatever happens to the building, and its eagles, I’m hopeful that years from now, we’ll look back at our nights on the Pac Bell Building and laugh at all the circumstances: the unwitting guard; the drunken australian; the temporarily borrowed cones from MOMA (yes, they were returned). Oddly enough, we may be in our best times, as explorers in an economic recession. Sure, the good stuff is always going to be risky, but only a recession would make a $118 million building accessible to a few camera-wielding outlaws in search of the next click-fix.

Further Research

• Entire story of the building at Preservation Magazine
• Architectural Information and Future Plans from Urban Bay Properties
• A 1925 Description of the Building
• See the entire set of photos from the excursion here [My own set of photos]and here [Scott’s photos].

Making the drive from Chicago to Detroit, along Interstate 90 is a lot like traveling back in time. The modern roadside outside of Chicago slowly seems to recede into oblivion along the way. Factories and coal fired power stations crop up, and suddenly the hulking mass of the Gary Union Station passes your window – a blemished reminder of a once-grand past.

Though Gary is only 30 minutes from downtown Chicago, it could just as well be in a third world country. Drive through downtown Gary, and you’ll find yourself on a barren boulevard, buffeted on each side by abandoned social clubs, theater marquees, and beauty shops. In the span of about 1/2 a mile of Broadway Avenue, once an exemplar of Main Street USA, you’ll find the buildings to be nothing more than decaying time capsules awaiting their inevitable “demolition by neglect.”

I’m a West Coast native. Everyone with us on the drive to Detroit had never been to the Rust Belt before. Was this the American Hestia of steel we had been taught about in our high school History textbooks? Somehow, it seemed these books had become outdated in little more than a decade. Gary soon makes you realize the pitfalls of modern, free-market capitalism, unhindered by checks and balances, a boom-town driven purely by the motive of profit. What’s truly unfortunate is that Carnegie Steel is long gone, but the children and grandchildren of the men who built Gary are stuck in a place that has little in its future, and a rut of steel to try to dig out from.

Today, much of our steel is imported; our manpower is exported. Our unions no longer exist — at least not in the sense that they once did, when over 40% of the American workforce were members of a union. If Gary is our example, and steel work is the epitome of work, then we are no longer the “Workers of the World.” When I myself brood over our post-industrial lot, I often like to reflect on a little-known introduction by playwright Arthur Miller in a book about Cartier-Bresson. Miller says of Cartier-Bresson’s photos of the decaying roadsides of 1950s U.S.:

The very horizon is often oppressive, jagged with junked cars, the detritus of consumer culture, which after all is a culture of planned waste, engineered obsolescence. Whatever lasts is boring, what demands its own replacement energizes our imaginations.

After rolling up to a side street from Broadway, the five us found the mouldering marquee of a hulking theater on the corner. The lettering advertised the appearance of the “Jackson Five: Live Tonight.” Certainly in jest, the marquee held its own ironical ode to the family that made Gary famous — perhaps more famous than its steel moguls. We peeked inside of the theater to find a different world than the one just outside. Orange seats in the trademark hue of the 1970s stank of mold and rotting wood. The seat cushions themselves were strewn all around the theatre grounds, which had turned from wood or cement (whatever may have been there before) into a mass of organic, decaying dirt, all harboring its own garden of tenacious flora. A grand piano, sans legs, lay belly-down in the orchestra pit, and the original tapestry-like curtain still hung from its rods high above on the stage, itself depicting a lively mediterranean scene but darkened by years of decay.

It was no longer a theater of echoes, as it likely once was. Our voices carried off into the many holes that weathering had created. Towards the front lobby, up a set of grand, iron-wrought staircases, I fortuitously stumbled inside one of those holes to find that it was a passageway into a completely different building. The building that adjoins the theater is just as incredible as the theater itself. It’s a hodge-podge of apartments and doctor’s offices, connected by cavernous hallways filled with tumbled bricks and a thick, 30-year-layer of dirt. Trumble beds, long collapsed from their closets in the wall, appeared in the middle of rooms. Chairs and pieces of artwork still remained in the rooms.

Deep inside one of the kitchens of these apartments, hidden beneath a caked layer of dust, I discovered a single seashell, likely left by the flat’s last inhabitant in the 70s. It was perhaps the most eerie artefact I’ve discovered during my life as an explorer, simply because of its minimalist display of a life past lived in a place that is geographically distant from the sea. I was forced to visualize the building at its zenith, when young professionals flocked to these apartments, filled with big dreams and a bright future. The reality is that this building probably ended its life as a slum, only to decline into vacancy along with Gary’s entire downtown corridor.

I returned to the theater and hobbled among the cushions for a few minutes. Emerging out of the exit into the light, I felt as if my whole life’s outlook had been altered by a single, hulking brick structure. Everyone had a look of shock on their faces. But Gary was just the beginning of our trip. We had to find the next place to discover. So, with heavy hearts, we hopped into our rental van and departed for another abandonment, another adventure.

In my first few months of ‘seriously’ exploring, I formed a personal list of targets. I was pleased to have visited, four years later, the inside of each and every item on that list… With the exception of one building.

The Schlage lock and key factory has a storied history in the annals of San Francisco industry. Walter Schlage emigrated from Germany after completing his apprenticeship at the renowned Carl Zeiss Optical Works in Jena, Germany. After a jaunt across the Atlantic, and a brief foray through Brazil and the West Indes as a ship engineer, he landed on the shores of San Francisco – not much older than myself.

When he arrived in early 1900s, San Francisco’s Visitacion Valley was little more than a railway stop for the Southern Pacific, occupied by a veritable playground for San Francisco businessmen, including lodging, trap & rifle shooting, boxing, drinking, and other forms of “recreation.” Schlage purchased his three-acre tract of land from a local maker of custom mining machinery, the Bodinson Manufacturing Company. He hired Bay Area Architect William Peyton Day to build a Spanish colonial administration building – quite a flourishing design for what was – at the time – a very utilitarian industry. In addition to the four-story office building, Day designed Schlage’s Factory 1, a quintessential early-20th century industrial design, with its trademark sawtooth roof and triangular shape – not too unlike the iconic designs of famed Ford architect Albert Kahn.

Today, the administration building looks exactly as it did over eight decades ago. The same fire escape descends into a dark corner where pigeons have made a roost; where standing water stagnates. Today, this 1926 “spanish colonial” is all that will soon remain of what was once a central hub of San Francisco industry. The rest of the site will be quickly converted into affordable housing and “Green” certified condominiums — surely a boon for the Visitacion Valley neighborhood, but also a sad loss for what had been a prescient reminder of San Francisco’s proud, industrial past.

Schlage’s Toxic Legacy

I wouldn’t pretend to be opposed to such projects. In fact, Schlage was a rampant destroyer of the area’s water table, contributing – at minimum – 3074 pounds of VOCs to the groundwater (and that’s just the stuff that’s been filtered out through remediation efforts). But make no mistake about it: This project’s intention is to cover up and end what has become a legal maelsorm for two big corporations – a developer on one side and an industrial multinational on another (both have claimed that the other should assume responsibility for cleaning up the mess of VOCs).

When I first discovered this site in 2004, I had attempted to go the “legal” route of photographing the historical complex. I contacted the planning commission, who put me in touch with a representative at Schlage, who then put me in touch with someone at the parent company, Ingersroll Rand. In the end, probably because Ingersroll Rand didn’t want a young photographer “snooping around” their industrial trash heap, I was denied access. Little did I know what I would find out later: That the grounds were covered in Tetrachloroethylene (TCE) and Trichloroethylene (PCE) – synthetic compounds that are known to affect the central nervous system and cause acute health effects, even in small amounts.

Development Victory for Paragon leads to “Demolition Celebration”

My final chance came in early 2009, when the approval for demolishment had gone through. Hundreds of millions of dollars were involved in the purchase of land, soon to be followed by a multi-year legal battle between Ingersroll-Rand and Universal Paragon Corporation. It all culminatd in February of 2009 with a “Demolition Celebration” (an oxymoronic phrase, if there is one, to most explorers). It was my last chance, and I had to take it.

Not much remained when I first entered the Schlage complex. Demolition crews graded mechanical components from A1 to A18. Each memo likely indicated the component’s historic merit, because the plan called for “mitigation” of historic industrial components. It’s likely that this meant most of the demo crew would be able to keep whatever spoils remained. As I climbed the balustrades of the historic building, pigeons were alerted to my presence. They fluttered into another room. The main lobby was buffeted by original varnished paneling. Each room contained two of its own, dedicated arched windows, over 8 feet high each — not something that every office monkey could brag about these days. There was an original safe for every floor. On the top floor, a lone, dead pigeon – decayed to its bones – remained. Within a few inches of its contorted corpse, a demo crewman with an astute sense of humor claimed the corpse with a piece of labeled, blue tape — just like other crewmembers had with historic dials and panels downstairs.

I spent all day walking among the corridors and twisting passageways of this Escher-like atmosphere. There were blueprints that contained plans for Ingersroll Rand’s satellite lock operations in Tecate, Mexico — a real relic of its own merits, illustrating the start of America’s move into offshore “maquiladoras” – the very deindustrialization of the American landscape that has put us in the quandry that we find ourselves today.

Ironically, by the time it had been acquired by Ingersroll-Rand, Schlage didn’t even use its own locks on the doors of its own factory. I made this discovery in an upstairs room (one of many rooms in Schlage’s self-heralded “Schlage University,” an in-house learning institution in all things lock and lock-related); on the door of that upstairs room, I looked in shock at a Chinese-produced door lock – its own ominous reminder of what we had become in San Francisco – one of the most marked dichotomies in history. In less than a hundred years, we had gone from a producer of mining machinery, metal locks, and vast naval ships, to a producer of 0’s and 1’s inside of microchips and database-driven social networking sites.

In a way, I’m glad to see a site like Schlage leave the Visatacion Valley. Its contribution had long passed when its counterpart factory broke ground in Tecate. At least now, it will provide homes for people, and maybe contribute a little green space. I only hope that future generations will look at the lone remaining Spanish Colonial building, and wonder why it’s there. I hope they will glance at the mysterious lettering near the Muni stop that says “Safety Subway,” and ask about its origin.

Schlage may have a dirty past, it may have passed its time – but it doesn’t mean that knowledge of its past can’t help us move forward.

Further Research

Environmental Impact Report EIR (with Historical Background)

Developer’s Web Site